March 2009

March 30, 2009

After years of being the guy sitting in the chair perched over the pool of water as people threw baseballs at the trigger to dump him in, he has resigned as Chairman and CEO of General Motors.

A statement said he was leaving at the request of U.S. President Barack Obama's administration.

You can read into that that further government support to the company was contingent on him stepping down.

It's a shame in a lot of ways.

I have had the pleasure of interviewing Wagoner on a number of occasions over the years, and he is one of the nicest guys in the business.

He had an amazing memory for names and facts, and a pretty good grasp on what the industry needed to recover and prosper.

He wasn't a 'car guy' in the traditional sense - his specialty was finance, ironically. But he made a point of hiring car guys like Bob Lutz, and giving them the freedom to develop the products with the design, technology, value and quality the market wanted.

The fact that the Chevrolet Volt, due late next year if the company survives that long, appears to be the most logical way to introduce electric cars to our market, and that Buick ranked at the very top of the J. D. Power list for quality a couple of weeks ago, are indications the company was on the right track.

But GM - and to a somewhat lesser extent Ford and Chrysler - couldn't overcome the legacy cost issue that has bedevilled them for decades, a problem created by the U.S. government's systemic failure to bring that country into the 20th century, let alone 21st: it remains the only major industrialized nation to tie pension and medical benefits to the company you work for, rather than the society you live in.

This gives major advantages to 'new' entries to the economy, just as it did when the same issue decimated the U.S.-based airline industry in the 1970s. Younger workers in newer companies will work for lower wages, and don't care about titanium hips.

So let's toss the older workers, the ones who built the society the newer companies now benefit from, on the scrap heap of history and carry on.

GM and the other domestics have managed to extract major concessions from their unions - forcing everyone to renege on deals that were made if not in good faith, then at least by the collective bargaining rules that existed at the time (reminds me of that classic line from "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" - "Rules? In a knife fight?")

I had dinner with Ross Brawn (name dropper! name dropper!) just before last year's Canadian Grand Prix.

At the time, he was top gun for Honda's Formula 1 team, having come out of a short retirement after helming Ferrari to a dominant position during the Michael Schumacher years.

By the Canadian race, the team had already given up on the 2008 car, which had been engineered before Brawn got there - all their efforts were focused on developing the 2009 version; drivers Jenson Button and Rubens Barrichello were left to flounder in the very shallow end of the F1 pool for the remainder of the season.

But Brawn told me the team was in good shape. He liked the personnel he had there, the technology, the support.

Partly because of this head start, and partly because fairly significant changes in the regulations governing the design of the cars meant everyone was more-or-less starting from scratch, Brawn seemed quietly confident things would be different in 2009.

I'll say.

But things got worse - a lot worse - before they got better.

Late last year, to everyone's considerable surprise, Honda decided to pull out of F1 racing. A couple of suitors were interested in the carcass, but especially in the current economy, no-one could - or would - pony up the cash.

It looked like the team would fold.

But just a few weeks ago, Brawn himself pulled off perhaps his greatest engineering feat - he engineered a deal which saw the assets of the Honda F1 team, notably the new chassis, the drivers, the team, most of the facilities, and the slots on the grid for the Grand Prix season, re-branded as Brawn GP.

Brawn had also arranged a supply of Mercedes-Benz F1 engines, essentially the same as used by last year's champion, Lewis Hamilton.

The team had about three weeks to get ready for the first race of the season in Melbourne Australia.

So, what has Brawn GP done lately?

How about one-two in qualifying, and one-two in the race itself, first-time out, Button - Barrichello in tandem in each case?

I can't recall seeing such unbridled enthusiasm in an F1 garage after a race before - and justly so.

The one-two result was even more dramatic given that Barrichello had a fairly major shunt on Lap One, Turn One - it wouldn't be Melbourne without a biggie on Lap One, Turn One.

He had almost stalled off the line, causing the cars behind him to swerve to avoid him. Once he got going, he headed straight to the apex of the Turn One right-hander.

But Mark Webber in the Red Bull car decided HE deserved to be there, and moved to his right. A collision was unavoidable.

On the TSN feed I taped, the new play-by-play guy was never introduced (where did Vic Rauter hosting our feed go??); I gather it was some overly-excited guy named Jonathan Legard, accompanied by the usually reliable Martin Brundle. Both were ready to have Barrichello tarred and feathered, and expected a stewards' intervention at any moment, never mind that Webber clearly ran into Barrichello, not the other way around.

Remembering how the stewards screwed up so many races last year, I wouldn't have been surprised if they did something stupid again to start this year.

But they must have seen it the way I did, because all drivers who survived the melee in one form or other (only Heikki Kovalainen in the second McLaren was too badly damaged to continue) carried on after pit stops for repairs. Barrichello was able to fight his way back, aided in part by other crashes and mechanical woes that affected the other competitors.

His second place was almost as impressive as Button's flag-to-flag win.

Jarno Trulli in a Toyota finished a remarkable third, given he was forced to start dead-last from the pit lane as punishment for having a rear wing which did not meet technical requirements.

So, a podium with no Ferraris and no McLarens?

That's pretty rare these days.

The McLarens were simply never in it, although Hamilton inherited fourth when most of the quick boys crashed or broke. The two Ferraris, while never really a threat, both ended up in the 'crashed or broke' class.

One race does not a season make. And as often is the case in F1, the real results may be decided in the committee room instead of on the track.

You see, the rear diffusers - aerodynamic devices at the lower rear of the car - used by Brawn, Toyota and Williams were protested and declared legal just prior to the race. It is claimed by the protestees that this design is good for something like half a second a lap - an eternity in F1 - and doesn't meet either the letter or the spirit of the rules.

The decision has been appealed; if it is overturned then Australia's results may be overturned, and everyone will be back to Square One, design-wise. If the decision is upheld, the other teams will have their answers probably before three or so races have been conducted.

March 28, 2009

I had another opening planned - actually, a suggested marketing slogan for the Indian car maker - but I am not sure I could get away with it in a family newspaper blog...

In any case, it has been an eventful couple of weeks for Tata.

First, their Jaguar brand, purchased from Ford last year, was ranked tied for first in initial quality over the past three years by the J. D. Power organization.

Tata can't take much credit for this because the cars were mainly built under Ford's stewardship. And make no mistake; Jaguar would not have survived, let alone done so well, if Ford hadn't bought the company and nurtured it.

Tata's other Ford purchase, Land Rover, unfortunately sits very near the bottom of that survey. Land Rover has known for years it has had issues; many of the same people who have dragged Jaguar up by the bootstraps have been in similar positions with Land Rover, but without the same impact as yet.

But Ratan Tata, head of the eponymous industrial conglomerate, said in a recent television interview that in order for Jaguar Land Rover to continue to be a viable business, it will need access to capital to invest in future product development. In the current credit crunch, few private sources are leaping to offer loans to car makers.

Tata has asked the British government not for a grant or bail-out, but for a loan guarantee for up to 500 million British pounds - nearly a billion dollars Canadian.

The request is connected to the fact that Tata bought the two British icons for nearly three billion dollars, using a bridge loan of even more than that. This saddled the company with huge debt just minutes before the bottom fell out of the car market.

In business, as in comedy, timing is everything.

At the other end of Tata's product line, the company launched the Nano earlier this week. The tiny four-seat two-cylinder car will sell for the equivalent of $2,500, and is projected to be to India and East Asia what the Model T Ford and VW Beetle were to their respective homelands - the vehicle that puts the country on wheels.

Mr. Tata said it was the culmination of a six-year dream, to come up with a product that would allow low-income Indian families to travel more safely than they typically do now - on their motor scooters.

It was generally assumed that the Nano would have the structural integrity of a wet Kleenex box, hence could never be sold in first-world countries. But the company says European sales are expected to begin in 2011, and plan to develop a variant for the US (and, presumably, Canada) for a year or two later.

March 20, 2009

I am not sure whether the J. D. Power reliability surveys are statistically valid or not. Is a total of some 45,000 data points out of some 50 million new cars sold over a three-year period - with some low-selling brands surely accounting for only a few of those points - enough to draw proper conclusions?

Like I say, I don't know.

What I DO know is that the Power surveys are taken very seriously by the car makers and by most consumers.

So the news yesterday that Lexus has been toppled from its perennial top spot in the three-year problems-per-100 cars survey is news indeed.

Even more so that an American brand (Buick) and a brand recently sold off by an American manufacturer (Jaguar, which Ford sold recently to Tata of India) tied for the top rank, given the problems North American brands have been experiencing in the marketplace recently.

Lexus remains a close third.

That Buick and Jaguar rank highly should not be a surprise - both have been consistently near the top for a long time.

Jaguar's quality took quantum leaps upward a few years after Ford took it over and taught the Brits how to measure quality - until you actually know HOW you are doing, it is hard to improve.

Buick has the distinct advantage that one of its best-selling models (the mid-size Allure/LaCrosse) is built in Oshawa, which again is consistently among the top-quality (and top productivity) car factories in the entire world.

It wasn't all bad news for Lexus, or its parent Toyota - Lexus had four models at the top of their respective market segments, and Toyota had five.

Odd then that Toyota's youth-oriented brand Scion, recently introduced in Canada, ranked very near the bottom.

I mean, those cars are essentially built from the same bits by the same people as various Toyotas.

March 16, 2009

The first 2010 Chevrolet Camaro, the first all-new GM car since the economic downturn, is rolling down the Oshawa assembly line pretty much as I type.

In a few minutes I will be among the first wave of journalists to drive this car. Our driving impressions are embargoed until this coming Friday evening - more details on that in the print edition of Wheels this Saturday.

***

The Camaro 'microsite' was supposed to go 'live' Monday morning at 10. Their PR department gave me the address - but I tried it this evening and it doesn't seem to work!

March 14, 2009

...I had dinner with Larry Burns, vice-president of Research & Development and Strategic Planning for General Motors a while ago.

OK, we weren't alone - there was a group of Canadian automotive journalists at this bunfight.

Larry is one of the smartest, not to mention greenest, people in the car business.

Among the many insights he shared with us that evening was that despite whatever progress is made in electric cars like his own Volt, or hybrids, fuel cells, hydrogen, you name it: in fifty years, the primary energy source for private transportation vehicles will be - gasoline.

As we have noted several times this year, despite the maturity of gasoline-powered internal combustion engine technology, engineers are still making substantial improvements in power generation, fuel consumption, and emissions reduction.

As long as gasoline remains essentially free, it will also continue to be the economic choice.

He also noted that people of "our" generation (give or take) view such electronic devices as cell phones, iPods, mp3 players, etc., as distractions from the driving task, hence we often criticize any attempts to integrate them into our automobiles (guilty as charged, Larry).

But he notes that younger people almost view driving as a distraction from their electronic communications devices.

So it is incumbent on car designers to find ways to allow these two activities to co-exist as safely as possible.

Won't be easy.

After all, some people think that car radios should be banned because they distract from the driving task too.

March 13, 2009

Does anybody pay attention to the pixelboard signs across our major freeways?

Sometimes I wonder.

The other day I was eastbound on the 401. The sign just prior to the Express/Collector split indicated that the two right lanes in the Express were blocked.

There only are four lanes at that point, so surely it was going to be tough sailing through there.

So, why wasn't everybody merging over towards the Collectors?

I mean, not everyone is listening to Darryl Dahmer on 680 News all the time.

But surely everyone could see the sign that the road was going to be congested?

Apparently not.

As it turned out, by the time I passed that spot on the road (in the Collectors, needless to say) the crash had been cleared up and the delay wasn't that bad.

But no-one could have known that.

Speaking of Darryl Dahmer, I have flown with him while he is doing his traffic reports, and it is one of the more remarkable intellectual accomplishments I have ever personally witnessed. He is giving these amazingly detailed reports, to two radio stations alternately (AM and FM), he recaps everything he has said previously on the basis that you might not have heard ALL the previous reports (every ten minutes), he is communicating with at least five different information sources (Ministry of Transportation, Metro cops, OPP, TTC, the station coordinators), he finds and reads the correct commercial after each report, he does it all without a single "um" or "ah" - and he's flying an airplane solo in the busiest air space in Canada!

Amazing.

He told me that he sometimes sees the traffic flow change in real time - he announces a problem, and from above he can see cars change direction to avoid the problem.